SlutWalk Accelerates Cultural Evolution, and San Francisco’s First SlutWalk

This week I had the pleasure of filing an article with R.U. Sirius’ online magazine, Acceler8tr. I’ve worked with R.U. off and on over the years, but Sirius will always be a her from my youth as the Founding Editor of Mondo 2000 – a seminal early computer culture, cyberpunk gate-crasher of a magazine that acted as shock troops of consciousness for those of us coming of age in the beginning of a new era.

The article that went live on Monday was a piece called SlutWalk, Take Back The Night and Evolution’s Future Sluts. In it, I described the global SlutWalk phenomenon in the context of older women’s rights thinking (which hates the movement and tries to infantilize the women involved while discounting their experience and people of all genders and orientations), Namely, the older women being printed and quoted in ‘legitimate’ media are against SlutWalk and also happen to be anti-porn. Sadly, these women are the ones featured in places like the NYT and Wikpedia’s own SlutWalk entry.

I felt this discussion was necessary, at the very least because tomorrow is San Francisco’s first SlutWalk. This is important because in the late 1970s, the women’s rights movement pivoted when Take Back The Night did the infamous San Francisco march. This event put Take Back The Night on the map as an anti-porn movement, handily conflating violence against women with pornography and sex work. Since then, both feminist and Christian conservative contingents have cemented decades of belief that porn and sexual violence are the same thing. This has served both contingents well in their moral crusades, despite increasing hard evidence to the contrary – and a new world of communication where sex workers are finally speaking for themselves and dispelling myths about victimhood at every turn.

Unfortunately I’m in Las Vegas this weekend and will miss SF’s first SlutWalk. Please go, even if you’re not the ‘target market’ – please support the tide turning on the hateful ideology being fought here. Let’s hope this is a true turning point in women’s rights – and the rights of all genders and orientations to be both sexual *and* safe at the same time.

Some people will bristle when I say SlutWalk represents a significant tipping point in cultural evolution. Yes: I think scantily clad girls marching in the streets around the world are agents of change for our species. Maybe that’s why its critics are panicking and handwringing as if Invaders From Mars have come out of a time machine from the future in heels and hose, reminding everyone that their face is up here.

(…) It’s a mindfuck to wade into that mess, meaning the whole “asking for it” ideology. Being a target is being female, no matter what we wear. And slut-shaming, a relatively new name for an old concept, is the acceptable way of shaming a woman for exploring, owning and expressing her sexuality in whatever way she sees best, most enjoyable, or even most empowering.

Same goes for slut-blaming. Methinks the ladies (and constables) are confusing sluts with victims. I don’t know about you, but I hear a lot of “good girls don’t like sex… too much” in all this anti-SlutWalk hyperbole. For SlutWalkers, sexuality —especially as expressed in ultra-feminine iconography — does not equal violence, victimhood or exploitation. Dressing sexually or behaving “slutty” does not mean a woman is automatically a victim, or just a victim-to-be, a sort-of victim-in-waiting — which sounds a lot to me like 1950s stereotypes where single women are labeled “pre-marriage.’ (…read more, acceler8or.com)